So Nice Of Reid To Offer To Do Elle's Files For Her. What A Gentleman!

so nice of reid to offer to do elle's files for her. what a gentleman! <3 no takebacks!

(Not included in the subtitles on the last image: Cross-talk with Reid saying "What?!" while Elle is saying "four of mine" and Elle following "Yep," with "Mmhm."

also:

Hotch smiling! twice in one episode!

Reid's little laugh when Cory asks him if he plays ball is so funny. Does he look like he does? That man was the ball.

i am once again thinking about morgan's protectiveness over reid this episode.

it's a little hard to tell because there's a scene with the rest of the team interrupting this scene and the next, but as best as I can tell. Morgan telling Reid to go back to the house is immediately followed by Morgan confronting Cory.

Reid isn't the most suited for physical confrontation (which Morgan knows this will likely escalate to) at the best of times, but he's especially not ready for it now. He's tired, kept up by nightmares, embarrassed by his superiors knowing about them, nervous about losing his job over it, and probably still feels a little betrayed by Morgan telling them without his permission even though at this point he understands why he did. So, Morgan tells him to leave, and gives him no indication that he thinks Cory is the unsub. Maybe even waits until Reid is a safe distance away to confront Cory. Trying to keep him out of harms way.

Unfortunately, there was nobody at the house to bring back to the scene (because they were already on their way) and Spencer "Danger Magnet" Reid came back quicker than I think Morgan was hoping for. Better luck next time!

i hate mary mays* and im so glad the characters (especially hotch) treat her with the appropriate amount of disdain. especially hotch's disgusted expression when she insists she did it to protect him.

hell, here's a brightened up version so you can really look at that expression.

hotch doesn't emote a lot, either in his face or his voice (he's just like me fr) but to me this reads pretty clearly as disgust, especially followed by this exchange.

sidenote: i would have really liked to see an earlier part of this exchange comes back, where mary mays asks hotch if he has children, and when he says yes, asks if there's anything he wouldn't do for them, to which he responds by saying that he wouldn't clean the blood of their victim off the floor. not quite so dramatic, obviously, but it's not unreasonable that jack would have some issues in his adolescence, for reasons i don't think i need to say. so. fic concept:

at some point in jack's adolesence (11-14ish?) he chronically shoplifts, and hotch catches him. maybe he finds the items in his room, maybe they're out together and hotch catches him doing it and realises it's not the first time. either way, he makes jack return the items and apologise, and has a conversation with him about it, wondering where he went wrong and deciding to take jack to a therapist. jack is seriously reluctant, and after some prying, hotch realises that jack is taking after him wrt emotional repression and believes that talking about his feelings would make him weak or less of a man, because his dad isn't do it, and his dad is as masculine as one gets. to motivate jack to go to therapy (and actually engage) he starts going to therapy himself. because he needs it. they all do. possibly some flashbacks or references to hotch's childhood, where he acted out very similarly and his father was uh. less than kind. insert somewhere a flashback to this scene. obviously it's very different, shoplifting isn't comparable to murder and cannibalism, but. you know. parallels. this is really half-baked and bad and random i'm sorry lmao.

this scene makes me need to lay down. goddddd.

sometimes i get the sense that reid is more attached to gideon than gideon is to reid. obviously they both serve as surrogates for the family member each is estranged from (gideon is estranged from his son and reid is estranged from his dad) but.

you know. reid clings to gideon, not physically but emotionally, and i think a lot of his wellbeing at the start of the series relies on gideon's presence. gideon almost certainly knows the most about reid out of anyone on the team—i don't think canon ever says that reid has told gideon about diana, but i would imagine he has—and i think reid feels understood by him in a way he doesn't by other people, even compared to the rest of the team who (mostly) try their best. i think he also tends to try to be as good and deserving as possible of gideon's presence, since he definitely at least partially feels like his father left because he wasn't good enough.

on the flipside, while gideon definitely sees reid as a son, he's...not the best dad. i think we see him repeating a lot of the mistakes that drove a wedge between him and stephen with reid, and i think that had mandy patinkin stayed on, we would have gotten a larger parallel there. he holds him at arms length, trying not to get too close, although he definitely cares about him more than he lets on and the mask slips sometimes, like this moment and on the plane after ldsk.

I love how Spencer gets defensive of mentally ill unsubs. Just imagine how many comments he probably got about his mom growing up. That was the 80s and 90s - people were less aware of mental illness, made fun of it more, and people loved to talk.

I wonder if he always stuck up for her or if he couldn't. If he knew he shouldn't snap back at the neighborhood boys that were twice his size or the teacher that talked about things she didn't know about. I wonder if people made comments like that about Diana. Saying oh it's too bad what happened to poor Diana. She is too ill to work and her husband left her... She was so sweet too. And Spencer knows she is still sweet - that she can be sweet when she is lucid enough to remember who he is, when she reads to him and calls him Crash - even though she might never know that she is the reason he is bruised.

I like to think that Spencer stood up for her but he might also be too smart for that. He would have to shoulder those comments about his mom. He would go home and cry into his pillow because the world was hating on the only person he had left for something she can't control. But then Spencer gets himself into the FBI, gets a badge and a gun and a score of degrees, and he never has to listen to another negative comment about his mom - or anyone with mental illness.

Spencer might not have always been able to protect his mom, but he sure as shit isn't going to let anyone bad mouth her now.